This article invokes the student world of Glasgow School of Art in the second half of the nineteenth century. We are the inheritors of at least a century of polemics, from Ruskin and others, about the aims of art and design education that poured scorn on the methods and aims of these early art schools in which four decades of activity under the control of the Department of Science and Art are often dismissed as a faintly ludicrous episode dominated by a power-crazed Henry Cole (Frayling 1987: 132-3). Ruskin feared, wrongly, that geometrical drawing would drive out the creativity of working class artists and designers; instead, the new doctrines of free creative drawing, derived from Ruskin, were used to drive out workers from the class of artists and designers, even in histories that are sympathetic to their cause.This collective blindness does a disservice to the students, artists, designers and teachers of this period and ignores the attraction of the ‘machine dreams’ (Sussman 2000: 197-204) contained in drawing discourses in the second half of the nineteenth century oriented to the realities of working in the local visual economy in Glasgow. The library holdings of Glasgow School of Art allow us to see some of the working of this local world where art, design and manufacturing interpenetrated.